Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions

Havana's earliest black hermitage was Espiritu Santo, created in 1638 and devoted to the Holy Spirit. By 1648 the devotion had become so strong and the neighborhood around it had grown so populous that church officials declared Espiritu Santo an auxiliary parish, and by 1661 the brothers had an auxiliary church (299). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3 Sometime near the end of the seventeenth century, British traders purchased a young Mandinga man in West Africa and transported him to Barbados. From there the youth was shipped on to South Carolina, where he joined other Africans and still more numerous indigenous captives to form the "charter generation" of slaves on that colonial frontier. The Mandinga were a people famed for their animal husbandry, and the young man may have become one of the enslaved "Cattle Hunters" who tracked rapidly growing herds through the dense Carolina forests. [Amy: This MUST be what Mend did as a slave! Then he goes to work for the once-owner of those cattle from La Chua.] (Landers cites here Wood: Black Majority, and "on contemporary Mandinga life along the Gambia, see Douglas Grant, The Fortunate Slave: An Illustration of African Slavery in the Early Eighteenth Century.") When the local Yamasee Indians rose against their British oppressors in 1715, the Mandinga man and other enslaved Africans recognized the chance for their own liberation. [photo: Mandinga war tunic, decorated with leather-covered Koranic scriptures and charms. AN162 …[Juan Bautista Whitten's] remarkable career…helps us understand how Africans in the Americas actually experienced and interpreted the age of revolutions and the failed promises of that era. We do not know what his African name was, or how he came to be enslaved, but in the 1770s Whitten survived the horrors of the Middle Passage to disembark at Charleston, South Carolina. The physician charged with visiting the incoming shipsand reporting on the health of the enslaved on board claimed that while crossing the Atlantic, some of the traders threw overboard as many as two-thirds of their captives. He described the "Filth, Putrid Air, Putrid Dysantries" on the ship and added, "it is a wonder any escape with Life." Whitten was one of the strong, or lucky, who did. (Landers note: The practice of throwing dead slaves into the Charleston harbour was still common in 1807, and Juries of Inquests ruled these deaths "a visitation of God." Unlike Olauduh Equiano or Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, or the Calabar princes Little Eprhaim or Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, Whitten left us no record of his terrible experience on the Middle Passage, nor, in fact, much information at all about his life as a slave. His was an atypical experience, perhaps, because he spent less than a decade enslaved on a plantation. In any case, Whitten did not let slavery define him. Even before the young African descended the gangplank to the required quarantine at the "pest house" at Sullivan's Island in the Charleston harbor, he would have realized that many of his countrymen had preceded him across the Atlantic. Many of their bodies littered the marshes opposite Charleston, and Whitten might have seen them as his ship approached the harbor. He might have heard "plantive African songs, in cadence with the oars" as black canoe men rowed passengers and goods from the ocean-going vessels to shore or seen the many "negro boats" from which black fishermen hauled in blackfish and trout for sale in the city. No other city in British North America imported more enslaved Africans than Charleston, which led a Swiss visitor in 1737 to remark that South Carolina was "like a negro country." By 1770 the colony was home to 80,000 persons of African descent who formed roughly 60 percent of the population; a majority of these were from the Upper Guinea region. …There are no documents that describe Prince's ethnicity, but the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database shows that in the years 1751-1775, 58 percent of all slaves imported into South Carolina and Georgia (35,774) came from the Upper Guinea region. Henry Laurens [slave trader] wrote of the Charleston planters' overwhelming preference for "large, strong People like the Gambians," adding that "tall, robust people best sute our business." Laurens and his contemporaries used the generic term "Gambians" to refer to diverse peoples who lived along the Gambia River and in southern Senegal, among whom the Mandinga, Wolof, and Fula were most numerous. Spanish records, uncharacteristically, fail to specify Prince's precise ethnicity, but he might have belonged to any of those groups. A slave ship captain from Charleston complained that he was short of space because the "Gambians" were "as large as one and a half in any [other] part of Guinea." They were also reputed to be among the healthiest slaves on arrival in South Carolina because the voyage to Charleston was far shorter than from other African locales. The Africans living along the Gambia River were noted for their fierce shore-based attacks on the slave ships that plyed their rivers, as well as for suicidal rebellions at James Fort in the Gambia River and on shipboard. When slaves took control of his ship in the Gambia River, Captain Thomas Davis blew up the New Britannia. He took his own life as well as those of 236 slaves, 96 free blacks, and all his crew, except for one man who had gotten into a boat moments before to try to "take up some slaves who had thrown themselves overboard." Such dramatic events were surely reported up and down the river, just as they were among trader networks. In 1769 a large African force almost overran Fort James itself. Incidents such as these caused some captains to refuse to trade in Gambia, and Charleston planters must have been willing to pay a high price to make the risk worthwhile. As Prince walked through the streets of Charleston with the man who had just bought him, the African character of the place would have been as obvious to him as to the city's European visitors. An anonymous "English Traveller" reproted that in 1774 "Charles Town" was home to 30,000 "black Negro slaves" and only "9 or 10,000 white inhabitants." The young African would have noticed black stevedores and sailors, coachmen, workmen, and artisans of every kind, as well as black women with foodstuffs and crafts arrayed around them for sale at Charleston's Lower Market. The chants of street hucksters selling oysters, shrimp, fruits, vegetables, baked goods, and other edibles from woven grass baskets balanced on their heads might also have reminded him of his home. As runaway advertisements noted, many of these black artisans and entrepreneurs would have borne familiar scarification patterns. Some may have displayed filed teeth. Heading down Bay Street, Prince and his new owner would have boarded one of the river boats that carried passengers and supplies up the Cooper River toward Whitten's inland plantation. Slave crews dominated the river and coastal traffic of South Carolina, and many of the patroons or pilots of these vessels were also black. One Camden merchant who traveled from Charleston up the Cooper River found "only negroes on board." Slaves from the upriver plantations also traveled the Cooper in canoes and pettiaugars, stopping to trade or visit with friends and relatives on neighboring plantations where it was not uncommon for them to share food, drink, and sometimes musical entertainment. The mobility, independence, and geopolitical awareness of the area's black boatmen benefited other members of the enslaved community, and as Prince traveled inland, he was probably already acquring information about his future destination and the politics of the new country. Prince's river journey up the Cooper River ended at Monck's Corner, an old trading post about twenty-six miles from Charleston that boasted several taverns and stores where area planters socialized and exchanged information. From the way station at Monck's Corner, a road ran northward to the ferry on the Santee River and on to the nearest town of Camden. The Whitten plantation lay along this important corridor, as did the Cantey plantation, where Prince would find a wife. The region Prince was entering was still a frontier. Catawba Indians allied to the British and Cherokees whose land the British would eventually take still formed part of the turbulent multiracial environment. The nearest town of Camden had only been established in 1768; five year later, jurors complined of the settlement's continuing isoloation and of the danger from "Wolves and Tygers, Bears" and from "idle and disorderly vagrants constantly hunting in the woods and destroying Deer for their hides." But Charleston's elites saw profits to be made and sent large numbers of newly arrived Africans into the wilderness to make them. Africans soon outnumbered whites in St. John's Parish. …The dense pine forests and swamps of St. John's Parish offered slaves another possible refuge, but early settlers had established critical timber and naval stores industries in the same forests. The British offered bounties on tar, pitch, rosin, and turpentine to encourage production, and by 1713 the planter William Cantey, Jr., and a crew of thirteen slaves were producing 200 barrels of pitch a year. Area slaves also cut and sawed timber that planters shipped to Charleston and on to other parts of the British Caribbean. Harvesting the forests proved profitable to Cantey and others like him. By 1779, one-fourth of the regions estates had more than fifty slaves living on them. Producing naval stores and cutting timer required crews of skilled men working communally, and under the tutelage of such experienced slaves, Prince learned the forest industry and became a carpenter on the Whitten plantation. The valuable occupational skills he acquired in the Carolina forests would serve Prince well in later life. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...The practice of throwing dead slaves into the Charleston harbor was still common in 1807, and juries of Inquests ruled these deaths a "visitation of God." (257) (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...After analyzing more than 27,000 slave trading voyages, Eltis... found that the 1770s and 1780s were the high poitns in the "Guinea" trade (257). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...The Canteys (also spelled Canty) were one of the oldest European families in South Carolina, having arrived on the the "first fleet from Barbados" in 1670, and they became important military and political figures in Charleston and later in the inland districts (260). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...One slave in the 1749 plot told his master that "they would run away to Augustine," upon which the master allegedly responded that "they might go and be damned." (260). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...The dense pine forests and swamps of St. John's Parish offered slaves another possible refuge, but early settlers had established critical timber and naval stores industries in the same forests. The British offered bounties on tar, pitch, rosin, and turpentine to encourage production, and by 1713 the planter William Cantey, Jr., and a crew of thirteen slaves were producing 200 barrels of pitch a year... By 1779, one-fourth of the regions estates had more than fifty slaves living on them. ...In the summer of 1775, Charleston's leading figures expressed indignation over the closing of Boston's port... At the same time the Grand Jury of Camden, on which several members of the numerous Cantey family sat, issued a proclamation protesting taxation without representation and remarking on their "Birthrights as Freemen." "And whereas we rather choose to die freemen than live Slaves, bound by Laws in the formation of which we have no participation," they "resolved to maintain our Constitutional Rights at the Hazard of our Lives and Fortunes." The irony of the refusal to "live Slaves" seems to have escaped the authors of this proclamation, but such fiery rhetoric would have resonated with attentive slaves throughout the region. As one historian noted, the Southern slaveholder's dilemma was "to prevent their slaves from imbibing the heady notions of liberty and equality, which had become their own rallying cry against Britain." It was a losing proposition. Charleston merchant Josiah Smith, Jr., wrote that "our Province at present is in a ticklish Situation, on account of our numerous Domesticks, who have been deluded by some villainous Persons into the notion of being all set free" on the imminent arrival of thenew royal governor, Lord William Campbell. Smith added that the rumor of British emancipation "is the common Talk throughout the Province, and has occasioned impertinent behaviour" in many slaves. ...Violence against Carolina slaves had by this time [1775] become almost commonplace. The South Carolina Gazette reported frequent acts of public terror including castration, gibbeting, burning alive, cropping ears, and decapitation. Without shame, slave owners advertised for the heads of their runaways, and occasionally the newspaper also reported the slaves' revenge for their mistreatment. By that fall a short-lived treaty of neutrality between Loyalists (Tories) and Patriots (Whigs) broke down, and violence erupted throughout the countryside. Patriot forces began arresting Loyalists in the interior... Patriots like the Cantey's found themselves confronting Loyalist relatives like the McGirtts... Emboldened Patriots demanded more than neutrality from their remaining Loyalist neighbors, and after harassment, intimidation, and sometimes acts of outright brutality, more Tories joined the southward exodus. Many departing Loyalists took their slaves with them to Florida... But slaves also moved on their own. Perhaps as many as 500 slaves flocked to Charleston harbor, waiting to be picked up by departing British ships... fifty-four Patriot Rangers "dressed as Indians" staged an early morning attack on the runaways' camp, killing a disputed number of them. Henry Laurens wrote that he hoped the raid would "serve to humble our Negroes in general." Apparently it did not. Three months later Laurens authorized the murder of another group of "Rebellious Negroes" gathered on Tybee Island. ...The planters' fears of South Carolina's slave majority eventually trumped their loyalty to Britian. In December 1775, South Carolina's reluctant revolutionaries became the first colonists to declare their independence. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress followed suit, and war began in the north. ...Prince may have learned about Florida's religious sanctuary policy from stories told in St. John's Parish or from one of the Spanish traders, sailors, or officials who frequented the taverns and stores of St. Marys. AN64 (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

Carolina runaways, including eleven-year-old Menendez, join Yamassee Indians war against English, lose, some retreat to S.A. (Landers: Fort Mose) When the local Yamasee Indians rose against their British oppressors in 1715, the Mandinga manand other enslaved Africans recognized the chance for their own liberation. Joining in common cause withthe Yamasee against their mutual enemy, the slaves fought for three years with Chief George's forces, all the while gaining valuable military skills and cultural, political, and geographical knowledge. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Schafer argues that by tightly controlling Indian traders, Governor Grant avoided disastrous wars like those his fellow Englishmen had experienced in Carolina and Georgia (309). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

Given the many contacts and long experience the Seminoles already had with persons of African descent, it is not surprising that they offered a refuge to the new wave of black refugees who fled from Propsect Bluff in 1816. Their geopolitical knowledge, military experience, and languages were valuable assets for the Seminoles. The independent "village Negroes," as they were sometimes called in English sources, provided annual tribute and military service to the Seminole chiefs with whom they were associated, but black leaders ruled the black villages. Reshaping his life once more, Abraham became a trusted interpreter and adviser for Chief Micanopy. Nero became the adviser and interpreter for the Seminole's principal leader, Chief Bowlegs, and located his village near to that of Bowlegs. Americans who later wrote about the Black Seminoles were unable to conceive of the vassalage relationship between Seminole chiefs and escaped slaves; they thought that all blacks living among the Seminoles were enslaved chattel. Thus, they believed that Micanopy "owned" Abraham, and Bowlegs "owned" Nero. Recognizing that the Americans intended to return them to slavery, Abraham, Nero, Harry, Fernando, and other runaways encouraged a Seminole alliance with the Spaniards, who were also feeling the pressure of American expansionism. The Spaniards stood to lose their colony, the fugitive blacks their freedom, and the Seminoles their rich lands and cattle herds. It may have been a marriage of convenience, but all of them pulled together against the common enemy (185). ...Abraham governed the independent village of Pilaklikaha (Many Ponds) near present-day Bushnell, Florida... When the former slave trader turned settler Horatio Dexter visited Pilaklikaha in 1823, he reported that "about 100 Negres belonging to Micanope and his family of different ages and sexes" had planted approximately 120 acres of corn, peanuts, and rice there. Dexter, like other Americans, could not see or acknowledge the independence of Abrahams villagers. Dexter also visited and reported on another black settlement at Boggy Island, where blacks allied to Sitarky had planted corn, rice, and sugar cane--the later from plants that Dexter had provided during an earlier visit to the village (196). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Abraham's wife was said to be the widow of the former chief of the nation," meaning Bowlegs, and may have been the woman Hagar, whose son, Renty, Abraham formally freed in 1839 (309). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

After the [Yamasee] war went badly for the the rebels, Carolina's Yamasee and African allies escaped together to Spanish Florida, where they claimed the religious sanctuary promised in 1693 by the Catholic monarch. Upon his conversion to Catholicism, the young Mandinga slave and former Muslim transformed himself from a "chattel" of the British into Francisco Menendez, a free subject of the Spanish King. The polygot and literate Menendez personified the cosmopolitan Atlantic Creole as described by Ira Berlin--someone with "linguistic dexterity, cultural plasticity, and social agility." It is quite likely that he had already demonstrated these characteristics on the West African coast; in the Americas, he simply added to his repertoire. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

The Whittens found a multicultural world in Florida... The largest group of non-Spaniards were the remnants of New Smyrna... In St. Augustine they became fishermen and merchants or raised produce on rented lands to sell at the public market; these were all occupations which free persons of African descent commonly held. ...many of those slaves approached Spanish government officials to request the religious sanctuary that Francisco Menendez and other runaways had earlier claimed. Although Florida's incoming governor, Manuel de Zespedes, doubted their religious motivation--he charged that "not one of them has manifested once here the least inclination to be instructed in and converted to our Holy Faith"-- he was forced to honor his Crown's century-old offer to shelter any slaves of the Protestants who sought the "True Faith." It was the governor's belief that the fugitives were simply seeking liberty or escape from a cruel master, and although he may well have been correct, he was obligated to receive all who sought religious sanctuary. To protect potential converts, the governor required all non-Spaniards to present themselves and declare their intentions to remain or depart the province. Anyone wishing to remove a slave from the province also had to obtain a license bearing the governor's signature. Any of the English settlers who planned to remain also had to register any blacks or mulattoes, either free or slave, "in their control." Finally, "every vagrant Negro without a known owner or else a document that attests to his freedom" had to report to the authorities within twenty days to clarify his or her status and obtain a work contract. Those failing to report would forfeit their freedom and be enslaved by the Spanish King. (Landers' note: royal slaves worked on public works such as mines and in the galleys.) AN329 …more than 250 blacks hoping to legitimate their free status came forward to be registered. Among these 250 former slaves was Prince Whitten. In the fall of 1788 Prince presented himself at the governor's office on the town square and dictated a statement to the Spanish notary about how he had come to Florida, initiating what would be a long paper trail in the Spanish records. As previous governors of Florida and Cuba had done, Governor Zespedes set an example by taking some of the black refugees into his own home. The rest he parcled out among townspeople and plantation owners who were able to shelter them, at least temporarily. This was the beginning of many subsequent connections between the townspeople and the former slaves. Because the black freedmen and women lived and worked among the townspeople daily, it was almost inevitable in this Spanish community that other social relations would follow. African and Spanish views of family and society were highly compatible, and each group surely recognized the value the other placed on kinship. A central feature of Mandinga culture along the Gambia River was the adoption or assimilation of children or other strangers through relationships of trust, protection, patronage, and reciprocity. Aided by their early contacts and patrons, their rapid adoption of Catholocism, their "respectable" behavior, and their valuable militaryand occupational skills, refugees from Anglo slaverylike the Whittens became important members of the free black community in Spanish Floirda. They worked hard, defended their community when called upon, and made free lives for themselves, acquiring property and intermarrying with other successfulrunaways. The Whittens and their fellow freedmen proved to be avaluable source of skilled labor and militaryreserves for the Spanish community, and despite attempts by some of their former owners to recover their chattel through legal channels, the once skeptical Govenor Zespedes consistently supported these blacks' right to liberty. [1764 Watercolor: View from the governor's window of the counting house and the royal treasury, St. Augustine] (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

They also learned how to work the social and religious systems that incorporated them. Religious transformation was the key to the Whittens' new liberties, for it was upon thier claim to want conversion that all other rights rested. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the Roman Catholic Church as a vehicle for African assimilation in terms of social acceptance and advancement in Spanish communities. In a sense it was the one true equalizer, for within the church all were "brothers in Christ." The Catholic Church had incorporated Africans centuries before Spain's expansion into the Americas, and although the Catholic evangelization effort among Africans in the Americas may have appeared minimal compared to that among Native Americans, the Catholic Church did welcome and encourage black converts. It is not surprising that newly freed men and women conditioned to a chattel slave system that limited their access to Protestant church membership would seize the opportunity to have themselves and their children baptized in St. Augustine's Catholic Church. The corporate structure of the Catholic Church had important cultural implications for both free and enslaved Africans, offering them affiliation, brotherhood, protection, and satus. Prince and Judy Whitten joined other refugees in seeking church membership for their children even before officially registering with government authorities. At about age nine, Glasgow became Francisco Domingo Mariano Witten, and seven-year-old Polly became Maria Rafaela Witten. Done properly, it took more time and effort to convert adults, and Prince and Judy could not be baptized until they had successfully passed the priest's examination on the basic tenets of the church. (Landers note: One eighteenth-century Cuban example of this doctrina exam consisted of twenty-six questions with set answers on the nature of the Trinity, creation, immaculate conception, Christ's death and resurrection, sin, confession, and salvation. Doctrina Para Negros, trans. and ed. Javier Lavina, Barcelona, 1989) Language impediments must surely have slowed the process, but four years after the baptisms of their children Prince and Judy also entered the Catholic Church, taking the baptismal names Juan Bautista Whitten and Maria Rafaela Quenty. [Painting: Christian baptism of an African in thirteenth-century Spain] Baptism into the Catholic faith served several important functions for black converts. Most imporant in the view of the priests was the religious function of removing the stigma of original sin and bringing the baptized into the brotherhood of the church. Perhaps equally imporant for black converts, however, was the social function of establishing an extended kin network between the baptized and his or her godparents, and between the parents and godparents, who thus became compadres. A prominent Spaniard, don Manuel Fernandez Bendicho, who was also by then their next-door neighbor, served as Prince and Judy's godfather at their baptism. (Landers note: Godparents typically gave gifts at the baptism and were expected to provide for the spiritual and material care of their god-"child" in the event of the parents' death, but more imporant were the ties that boudn the membes of the newly-linked "family." Such extended kinship may have had even stronger signicance for adult converts, manyof whom were uprooted and kinless (bozales (recently arrived and unacculturated Africans). Joseph Miller argues that Africans understaood Christianity as a form of healing, as well as of social integraton.) With Fernandez Bendicho standing beside the couple in the church in a public act of patronage, the family's social ascent had begun. The new Catholics Prince and Judy Whitten soon became among the most popular godparents in the black community of St. Augustine: Prince sponsored twenty-three individuals, while Judy served as godmother for thirty-one persons. Acquring so many "dependents" enhanced the Whittens' status in the Catholic community and reinforced their respectability. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Captain Spencer therefore had to rescind Admiral Cochrane's offer to relocate all who would serve the British. He told the assembled crowds of runaways at Prospect Bluff that new orders prevented him from transporting them as promised and warned them (correctly) that after the British departed, they would be preyed upon by the Americans and their Indian allies. In Pintado's presence, Spencer disarmed the Negro Colonial Marines, paid them for their service, and gave each discharge papers... the British officer would not allow the Appalachicola runaways to be forcibly returned to slavery. Following the same policy enacted by Admiral Cockburn at Cumberland Island, Spencer only permitted Pintado to interview the runaways to see if any would choose to go with him of their own free will. Of the 128 runaways Pintado was able to interview, only 28 individuals agreed to return to their former owners, and overight several of those ran away or changed their minds. One... named Samson proclaimed on being interviewed that the Spaniards and the Americans were the same, and that they would kill him if he returned. In the end, Pintado was only able to persuade ten women with small children to return voluntarily to flavery. He estimated the total number of runaways left at the fort at about 250, and reported that many of the former occupants were leaving for the black Seminole settlements at Tampa Bay." AN330 (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

Viewing the Seminoles as a buffer against Anglo encroachment, the Spanish government attempted to ensure their friendship by regularly hosting and gifting them in St. Augustine. The Crown allotted 6,000 pesos annually for their gifts, which included items such as cloth and clothing, hats, thread and needles, thimbles, scissors, beads, pipes, knives, axes, razors, mirros, tin pots, spurs, munitions, tobacco, aguardiente (rum), and food. Seminole women were given gingham and chinz cloth, and the children recevied the interesting gift of red paper. Special luxury items saddles went to head men... On at least four occasions groups identified specifically as cimarrones or slave runaways came to St. Augustine, usually in the company of Seminoles, and in an act that recognized their autonomy, the Spaniards gifted them as well (181). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...More blacks than whites were converted over the course of the second Spanish regime in Florida... Unlike some whites [and Indians], the fugitives had no intention of returning to a land of slavery and thus had more to gain by the conversion that guaranteed them sanctuary (268). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

Unlike their Anglo neighbors, Spaniards were not threatened by the blacks living among the Seminoles. Black and Indian militias had operated jointly to protect Spanish frontiers since the 16th century, and Spanish officials regularly posted black militiamen like Sergeant Felipe Edimboro at Seminole villages. AN331 (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...In an attempt to resolve the matter locally and more quickly, the Spanish and the British each appointed a commissioner to investigate matters at Propsect Bluff... Pintado compiled lists of the missing slaves and the names of their owners in St Augustine and Pensacola. Pintado's list included... Harry, a shipwright, caulker, and navigator, who knew how to read and write and was valued at 2000 pesos; Ambrosio, a shoemaker valued at 900 pesos; Garcon, a carpenter valued at 700 pesos; sailors, master carpenters, bakers, servants, laundresses, cooks, sawyers, masons, cartwrights, and field hands. Assuming this group is representative, which is likely, the blacks who lived at this settlement [Prospect Bluff] were certainly equipped to be self-sufficient. While they may not have been "black Robin Hoods," as one historian called them, neither were they the parasitic "villains" described by the Amercians. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...officers of Cuba's pardo and moreno units continued to assert their legal rights through memorials sent to the Cortes in Spain. The distant monarch, and now the distant Cortes, had always been more willing to support the medieval privileges of free people of color than had local Spanish officials. But the black militia officers must have thought they had to take the offensive and challenge the erosion of thier hard-won privileges and status or lose them forever. Captain Barba, who by this time had been an acknowledged leader of Cuba's free black community for more than 50 years, led the legal campaign to preserve and advance the rights and privileges of the free black militia, but many other officers also filed complaints. Barba related a series of insults that free black officers had suffered from Spanish Subintendant Inspector Antonio Seydel, such as being required to march in the same ranks as ordinary soldiers or to take off their hats in the presence of white officers. He cited violations of specific articles of the 1769 Reglamento that reorganized the black militias. Captain Miguel Porro, who would later fight the Georgia Patriots in Florida, also cited that Reglamento when he refused to doff his hat to a white officer. Cuban officials arrested Porro, and he spent eleven days in jail for his principles before being released. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Abraham probably escaped not from a Spanish physician in Pensacola by from the trading post of Forbes & Cmpany, the Pensacola company that succeeded Panton, Leslie & Comany as monopolists for the Indian trade in the Lower South. Forbes & Company inherited an already established commercial network that depended largely upon blacks and Indians. By 1786 Panton, Leslie & Company owned 250 slaves and nineteen separate land grants in Spanish Florida totaling 12,820 acres. Most of the company slaves worked on its various plantations and ranches, but some had specialized functions. For example, the company hired out its slave Langueste to the Spanish government as an interpreter for the Indians and collected his wages. Company slaves traveled to and from the Indian nations regularly, bring back cattle and trains of pack horses loaded with deerskins. At trading stores like the Almecen de Nuestra Senor de la Concepcion, located about six miles south of Palatka on the west bank of the St. Johns river in northern Florida, 50 to 60 slaves worked tending fields of corn and vegetables, herding cattle, and curing and tanning deerskins their compatriots brought in from the Indian settlements. In the company's St. Augustine warehouse, slaves processed the hides and prepared them for export (176). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

One of these, a man named Nero, had been raised as a slave on Francis Fatio's "baronial" estate of New Switzerland, on the St. Johns River. Because the plantation lay at the edge of Seminoles lands, there was frequent contact between Fatio's slaves and the Seminoles. Fatio received Seminole hunting parties at his plantation almost as a Spanish governor would, with gifts and food. Sometimes, as during the Bowles years, they came as raiders. It is not surprising that a number of Fatio's slaves learned the Seminole language and culture from these frequent exchanges... When Nero was still an adolescent he was either taken by, or joined, Indian raiders who attacked the Fatio plantation in 1812. Fatio sent agents out to try to recover the boy, whose family still lived on the plantation, but in vain. Lost temporarily from the historical recor, Nero reappears in the aftermath of the destruction of Prospect Bluff. AN379 (184). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Schafer, "Shades of Freedom" (296). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

The Seminoles had been incorporating escaped slaves into their society for at least a half-century. The so-called Lower Creeks had accompanies General James Oglethorpe from Georgia southward when he invaded Spanish Florida in 1740, and they returned to claim the lush savannas of central Florida after the Spanish and their Indian allies departed for Cuba in 1763. The Seminoles established a settlementnear present-day Gainesville, Florida, which they named La Chua for a nearby sinkholel. [Landers note: The Seminole town is variously spelled Latchaway or Alachua. Many Southeastern indigenous groups spoke languages of the Muskogean linguistic family. English traders designated those living along the Chatahoochee and Flint Rivers as Lower Creeks, while the so-called Upper Creeks lived on the Alabama, Coosa, and Tallapoosa Rivers] (309). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

Menendez's military experience earned him a commission as captain of the black militia of St. Augustine, and in 1738 he became leader of the free black town town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Menendez may have been accustomed to leadership. The English traveler Richard Jobson, who visited Upper Guinea a century earlier, wrote that the Mandinga "are Lords, and Commaunders of this country" whose tributaries included the Wolofs and Fulas. Africans of distinct cultural and political backgrounds made up the community of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, including those designated in Spanish records as Congos, Carabalies, Minas, and Mandingas, and some men had indigeneous wives. (Landers note: Scholars hotly debate the origins and meaning of these African ethnonyms. I have used them throughout as they appear in Spanish documents.) Spanish officials, however, referred to all of them as Menendez's subjects. Over the next quarter-century, Menendez and his militia defended their adopted homeland against both British and Indian attacks. Menendez wrote several eloquent letters to the King of Spain, detailing his military services and requesting a proprietary captainship.When the monarch failed to resopnd, Menendez took to the seas as a Spanish corsair, seekingto make his way to "Old Spain" so he could discuss the matter with the king in person. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Because Atlantic Creoles were so often on the front lines of these contests--European and American revolutions, Indian wars, slave revolts, and the international efforts to abolish slavery--they were keenly attuned to shifting political currents. These African and African-descended actors had access to a wide range of political information, both printed and oral, and they made reasoned and informed choices in their attempt to win and maintain liberty. They were often critical to the balance of power and soon became adept at interpreting political events and manipulating them, when possible, to achieve freedom. Their initiative and agency--their acts of resistance, flight, and marronage (the formation of fugitive slave communities in the wild), and their shifting relationships to various European, American, and Native American powers--shaped the course of international events, as well as local responses to them. ...The Atlantic Creoles about whom I write fought variously for the King of Kongo, the King of England, the King of France, the French Jacobins, Muskogee and Seminole chiefs, the King of Spain, and sometimes for themselves. Each shift of allegiance required a reevaluation of political platforms and programs, with the possibilties for freedom that each offered. AN451 As they changed allegiances and identities, Atlantic Creoles also helped to shape the course of history. …Although the English and French sources for these events are rich, it was the Spanish juridical and archival traditions that recognized loyal Africans and Indians as imperial subjects with a legal personality, and therefore a voice, in Spanish records. Materials actually produced by persons of African and native descent are common: they include loyalty oaths; petitions to Spanish officials and to the King, such as that written by Menendez; legal suits; interrogatories; civil, religious, and criminal records; and more. Through these various sources it is possible to gain access to verbatim statements of the Atlantic Creoles, as well as insights into their thinking. Africans and Spaniards shared many understandings of the proper relationship between ruler and subject. Loyal subjects generated recipricol ogligations from those they served, and both groups organized their societies as sets of interlocking corporate and family structures. These cultural similarities allowed even those Africans newly admitted into the Spanishpolity to quicky learn Spanish legal and cultural norms. Once considered movable property, these newly "human" and free individuals were quick to pursue the rights and privileges accorded them through membership in centuries-old Spanish legal, religious, and military corporations. As they exercised their freedom, Atlantic Creoles, repeatedly stressed their loyalty, their service, and their devotion to the Spanish King and to the "True Faith" in written documents. They also enacted these values in public ceremonies. When they felt aggrieved--and some had reason to--they remonstrated, usually blaming any failure to honor promises and obligations on local officials. The distant Spanish King, dependent as he often was on their services to hold his far-flung and threatended frontiers, almost always supported the Atlantic Creoles. The enslaved African whom the English called Big Prince Whitten lived through the misery of the Atlantic slave trade, the American, French, Haitian, and Latin American revolutions, Indian wars, and, in Cuba, slave revolts and the fight for abolition. Whiteen and others like him learned what it was to be a slave in an English colony. They gradually became acculturated to the norms of Anglo slavery--learning plantation regimes, learning English, forming relationships with other Africans and with "country-born" slaves, and eventually starting families. The 1770s were the peak years of the Carolina slave trade, and as more and more Africans poured into flourishing Carolina plantations, freedom must have seemed an ever more remote possibility for Whitten and his fellow slaves. But then came the American Revolution. Its stirring rhetoric moved many who were actually enslaved to claim their own inalienable right to liberty and to fight for it. South Carolina experienced some of the bloodiest fighting in the American Revolution, and enslaved families embroiled in that violence made political choices that might save or ruin them. As battles raged around them, they gained first-hand knowledge of the politics and racial dispositions of both Patriots and Loyalists. Rejecting both, the Whittens and hundreds like them risked everything to escape across the international border and, as Menenedez and otehrs had before them, to claim religious sanctuary in Spanish territory. There they acquired legal personalities and rights, shedding the dishonor of enslavement. Unable to tolerate such a threat to the chattel slave system, the new U.S. government pressured Spain to renounce the sanctuary policy in 1790; thereafter, freedom seekers would have to find alternate routes. …As Atlantic Creoles struggled to maintain their traditional rights in Cuba, Black Seminoles like Abraham and Nero and Spain's African-born militiamen like Prince Whitten joined forces to try to prevent the U.S. Advance into Florida. They helped undo the so-called Patriot Rebellion of 1812 but could not prevent Andrew Jackson from destroying the Seminole heartland six years later. By this time the Spanish empire was disintigrating, and U.S. expansionism could not be stopped. In 1821 Spain ceded East Florida to the United States, and Prince Whitten led his black troops into exile in Cuba, retracing the exodus of Francisco Menendez and the people of Mose more than half a century earlier. The Black Seminoles fought on through another long war against the forces of the United States before Abraham also led his people into exile in Arkansas. …As all their histories show, Atlantic Creoles were extraordinarily mobile, both geographically and socially, and their horizons had few limits.These were not people who felt constrained by place or defined by slavery. AN452 Nor was race their primary identification; that imposition came later. In this revolutionary era, political exigencies demanded more fluid identties. The great instabilty of the age and of the spaces they traversed created remendous danger for these Creoles, but also opportunity. The Atlantic Creoles who surface in this narrative are those who repeatedlty risked danger, found an opening, seized the moment, and freed themselves. Some lived apart--under their own governance while they could, or withindigenous people with whom they found common cause. AN453 Others assessed the strengths and weaknesses of various European powers and supported the one that might best secure them liberty. These alliances were rarely stable, and Atlantic Creoles alwayshad to be ready to adjust quickly to changing conditions. Their mutability and adaptability were survival tools that enabled them to build their lives anew when necessary. And it almost always was. The wars and political transitions they experienced led to repeated dislocation and exile, yet they found ways to begin again. These Atlantic Creoles were a diverse group, born in West Africa, in Haut du Cap, in Jamaica, in Havana, or in the Indian nations of Florida. Some were born enslaved; others were always free. Some were literate, urban, and propertied, while others rose out of more degraded circumstances. What united them was not only their time and place, but a determined quest for freedom. Refusing to be "bound in shallows and in miseries," they took the tide, and while few went on to gain fortunes, many achieved liberty. It has been a privilege to write about their little remarked, but fascinating lives. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...as a skilled carpenter and lumberman, Prince would have proved very valuable to Weed's newly established lumbering and sawmill operations along the St. Marys River. But just across the St. Marys River, a body of water only several miles wide at some places, was another country and the chance for a different life for the Whittens and others like them... One cold Sunday mornign, in December of 1786, a year and a half after being enslaved by Jacob Weed and after at least three failed attempts, the Whittens made their way across the dark water of the St. Marys into Spanish Florida. Attempting to recover them, Weed placed runaway ads which desscribed Prince as "7 feet high, strong built and brawny, a carpenter by trade, 30 years of age... talkative"; his wife, Judy, as "a smark, active wench... also about 30 or upward and country-born 5' 7 or 8" high"; and their children, Glasgow, "about 8 years of age, a well lookng boy of open countenance and obliging disposition," and Polly, "6 years old, lively eyes and gently pitted with the pox." Weed's notice stated that he believed Prince had "carried them off with him to Florida to avoid a separation from his family to which he is much attached"--which is exactly what Whitten did. In crossing the newly established border of the St. Marys River, the Whittens finally found freedom, but they did not escape danger. Because Spanish Florida had the misfortune to be the southern desire of the new United States of America, a nation "as ambitious as it is industrrious," and because it had an important Atlantic port in St. Augustine--on the northern rim of the Caribbean and the southern fringe of the Anglo world--the Whitten family would continue to be swept up in the dramatic political and military events that swirled around them. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

Legally protected and free at last, Prince Whitten began to establish himself in Spanish Florida. Over the course of the next thirty-five years, Prince and Judy and Glasgow and Polly transformed themselves from fugitive slaves into loyal Spanish subjects. The instant Prince and his family had crossed the St. Marys River--that Spanish Jordan--and reached the other shore, they were "born again." They were made human, acquiring personhood and autonomy. They took on new names, new legal personalities, and new corporate identities and began to enjoy precious liberties long denied them. One was simple geographic mobility: they could go where they wanted. Choice was another. They could choose what work they would do, where they would live, and whom they would marry. They could control their persons, their property, and even others. They gained access and voice, learning quickly how to make claims on a legal system that recognized and protected them. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

The Catholic Church also offered another avenue for advancement for the Whittens and others like them. Remarking on the special need to educate children in Catholic precepts in a colony populated by so many foreigners, Governor Zespedes established a school for boys in st. Augustine in 1786. He ordred Father Thomas Hassett (who had earlier established a school for children of color in Philidelphia)toenumerate all the boys living in town and to visit their parents and explain the importance of educating their children in reading, writing, arithmetic, and Christian doctrine. Black youths were welcome at the new school, but in theory they were to sit in a separate section of the classroom. Despite this attempt at segregation, the governor required that black pupuls receive the same spiritual and temporal instruction as white students. The teachers were not to permit students to call each other names or "remind them of the faults of their fathers"; rather, all were to be treated alike as faithful Christians with "love and impartial charity." It may not have been easy for the Whittens to take advantage of this educational opportunity. Although the government assumed the costs of the school, the regulations required the children to be clean and well-groomed, and to have shined shoes. Father Hassett described the colony in 1788 as "miserable" and "dying" for lack of money, trade, and population, and even poor white parents may not have been able to afford the luxury of withdrawing children from work to attend school. Neverthelss, Prince and Judy understood the value of an education, having fled from a system which largely prohibited the education of blacks. They enrolled Glasgow in the school, and his subsequent literacy was an asset to the family in later years. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

AN454 …Prince Whitten may have entered Florida with little in the way of material goods, but the valuable occupational skills he had acquired in Carolina allowed him to support his family. The Spanish work requirement for the freed newcomers could be considered a form of social control, and it clearly was designed to make useful subjects out of potentially disruptive foreign and unassimilated elements. Still, from the perspective of a former slave who had for so long been unable to control his own destiny or that of his family, the ability to select an employer and be paid for labor must have seemed a considerable improvement over his former condition. Prince's first known employment was on the plantation of Abrose Nelson, north of St. Augustine and on the southern bank of the St. Marys River over which the Whittens had crossed to freedom. Other planters in the region were threatened by the example that the newly freed slaves provided to their still enslaved chattel. William Pengree complained that "the negro Prince and his family, who in reality belong to Colonel Weed, have behaved with such shamelessness and presumption since they have moved to the River that two of my negroes have fled with the idea of becoming free; I have been able to catch one and have sent to Georgia in search for the other." Pengree asked that Prince be forbidden from further association with his slaves, which suggests that Prince was spreading the word about freedom. AN455 Not long afterward, Prince learned that "The American Major Weed had vowed to recover them by force, if it costs him his life," and Nelson petitioned the governor to allow the Whittens to move into St. Augustine. The governor agreed. We can only wonder what might have provoked such a vehement declaration from Weed, but his honor and possible profit may have been at stake--Weed had accepted a commission to return Prince and Judy and the children to their former owners in Carolina. As soon as the danger of recapture had passed, Prince and his family returned to the countryside, this time taking up residence at the North River plantation of James McGirtt with whom Prince signed another year-long work contract. How and why Prince and Judy went to work for a planter linked by marriage to Judy's former owner in South Carolina is unknown, but the contract stipluated tha tPrince would labor as a carpenter and Judy would wash or cook for McGirtt in exchange for room and board and twenty-five pesos a year. Nine months later Judy gave birth to the first of her children to be born free, but the family's joy turned to grief when, eight days later, thebaby boy died. The church sacristan baptized Juan Fatio in extremis "in a private home," and the next day Father Miguel O'Reilly officiated as the family buried the child in the Catholic cemetery in St. Augustine. Sometime after the death of the Whittens' infant son, McGirtt began to demand that Judy do field work. Prince promptly went to court to protest that he could not "permit" it. The use of that word alone speaks volumes. It was Prince who controlled his family, not McGirtt. "With the utmost respect," Whitten asked for the return of his work license and the amount he was owed for the labor performed in the nine and a half months he had worked for McGirtt. It had not taken Whitten long to learn to exercise the rights available to him under Spanish law, and the man who ahd once been considered chattel property now challenged a white employer's violation of his contract." With her son's help, Judy later filed a suit against members of the influential Sanchez family for alleged insults and physical mistreatment. Judy asked the court to admonish her abusers and identifi3ed herself in the complaint as a vecina--or property-holding member of the community, making no mention of her race. She had, in essence, placed herself on equal legal footing with the Spaniards she was suing. Spanish law permitted women, slaves, and even children a voice in the courts, but it did not consider all testimony equal, and class with the single most important determinant of veracity. AN456 Although the court gave her no satisfaction, Judy's legal and social challenge would have been inconceivable, and dangerous, in South Carolina. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

[Written description of St. Augustine's celebration of the new king Carlos IV in 1789, including parade of officials and carpenters guild, gun salvos, Viva cheers, governor tossing custom-minted silver coins, singing, mass, and live comedy theater]. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

Having gained freedom, the Whittens worked to expand their economic opportunities. In St. Augustine they had more access to information and patronage networks, as well as more diverse employment. Prince began to supplement his earnings from carpentry by securing stone-quarrying and timbering contracts from the Spanish government. In an informal apprenticeship, the Whittens also took in an agregada or dependent, a free black girl named Margarita about the same age as Glasgow and Polly, whom Judy began training to be a domestic. The 1793 census shows the Whitten family living in a rented house on San Carlos Stret, where some of the community's most influential citizens lived. Several doors down from the Whittens, the planter don Francisco Xavier Sanchez had established a home for his eight free quadroon children and their five slaves. By the following year the Whittens had acquired a slave of their own, whose child Glasgow and Polly (now Francisco and Maria) served as godparents. Living on one side of the Whittens was don Manuel Fernandez Bendicho, their patron and godfather. One the other side lived the Scotsman don Juan Leslie, head of the Panton Leslie & Co. Indian trading house. Leslie had fourteen slaves living in his household as well as an eighteen-year-old apprecntice, Jorge J.F. Clarke. Like Sanchez, both Leslie and Clark established mixed-race families. Both of these influential men also became patrons of Prince Whitten and his family through Prince's enlistment in the free black militia of Florida. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

Spain had depended upon informal black military service in the Caribbean since the sixteenth century, and black interperters and soliders had helped establish Florida. The colony's first black militia was established in 1683 and helped to defend Florida from pirates and Indians. In the eighteenth century Spain's new Bourbon rulers formalized "disciplined" militias of pardos (mulattoes) and morenos (blacks) and encouraged enlistment by exempting recruits from certain municipal taxes or levies. Two other changes were also socially significant. The Bourbon reforms allowed black militiamen to elect their own officers (a practice already observed in the provincial militias), and most important, the crown extended the fuero militar to pardo and moreno units. AN457 The fuero was a corporate charter with important implications. By its provisions, black militiamen were exempt from prosecution in civilian courts and gained equal juridical status with white militiamen. The fuero also granted other rights to blacks who served in the military--hospitalization, retirement and death benefits, as well as the right to wear uniforms and bear arms. (Landers note: …literature on black military service in the Spanish colonies includes Sanchez, "African Freedmen and the Fuero Militar: A Historical Overview of Pardo and Moreno Militiamen in the Late Spanish Empire"; Gascon: "The Military of Santo Domingo, 1720-1764".) Officials in the Viceroyalty of New Spain resisted the social advancement of black militiamen and sought to abridge the benefits of their fuero, generally limiting its enjoyment to officers in active service. But Spanish military officials in Florida and other areas around the Caribbean sorely needed all the help they could get and depended heavily on black recruits. Africans and their descendants clearly appreciated the juridical and social benefits of militia membership, and despite the dangers such service involved, they developed traditions of long-term family service. …Late in June [1793] an advance force from Georgia burned the frontier post of Fort Juana, and a hastily convened Council of War in St. Augustine voted to "arm all free black and mulattoes in the province, for being fugitives from the State of Georgia, they will be loyal and will defend themselves to the death in order not to return to their former slavery. Whittens next-door neighbor, Juan Leslie, was named to command the newly formed free black militia, in which Prince enlisted and performed his first military service for Spain. Most of the free blacks who reported for duty were also freed slaves from the former British colonies, and they elected Whitten as their Sergeant. …Whitten and forty-one members of the free black militia joined forty Cuban infantrymen, thirteen white militiamen, and some Seminole allies in a naval assault that dislodged the invaders. For the rest of the summer Sergeant Prince Whitten led a small party of free black cavalry in frontier patrols… on one of their scouting expeditions the free black militiamen found a call to revolution posted on a tree that read: "Attention, Slaves of the Spanish Tyrants. All persons of whatever denomination can now participate in the great blessings of liberty and escape from the yoke of Spanish tyranny by coming to the glorious Republican standard which flies triumphantly on the northern shore of the St. Marys where you will be welcomed with friendship and protected in your person and property so that you can once again enjoy the blessings of liberty and equality." Whitten and his compatriots were not enticed by this offer to cross back into the American territory they had struggled so hard to escape… They knew they had political options, but they still supported the Spanish monarchy, even in the face of unofficial racial discrimination. Governor Quesada, who had earlier denied land grants to free blacks in terms that suggested at least some personal racism, found that Whitten and his men had proved their loyalty in difficult times. In his report to the Captain General of Cuba, Quesada commended the service of his "excellent company of free blacks." The free black militia had proved itself in its first armed conflict and acquired at least some honor in a culture which valued military valor so highly… Whitten [had] many opportunities to… defend his family… and his adopted monarchy… Through it all, and despite great hardships, much danger, and little reward, Whitten remained loyal to the Spanish Crown that had freed him and his family. …It is hard to say what the rebels knew of the British system and what it could offer, but the French colonial devil they did know. Those who frequented Le Cap, like Biassou, Jean-Francois, and Toussaint, would have frequent contact with merchants and sailors, some of whom were free blacks, from Spanish ports such as St. Augustine and Havana. Presumably the rebels of Saint Domingue would have known of the opportunities the Spanish king made available to freed slaves in the Caribbean, including land and salaries for military service… Although Spanish officers frequently disparaged blacks, faced with a chronic shortage of worthy regular troops and inadequate financial and material resources, they had long relied on black militias to help them maintain a tenuous sovereignty in the region. Persistent prejudice and ranking inequalities did not dissuade men of African descent from enlisting, and by 1770 more than three thousand men had joined Cuba's black militia, making up one-fourth of Spains' largest army in the Caribbean. …Spanish officials did feel compelled in general to honor the promises of freedom, relocation, and support made in the name of their king, but they also watched the [Haitian] former slaves with fear and suspicion and tried to isolate them and the dangerous ideas they represented. …The [Haitian] black armies wanted, instead, to maintain their units, ranks, salaries, and rations and to embark together for some designated place where the would be given lands to cultivate and be permitted to form a town. They had not given everything only to return to their former states. They argued that they would then constitute a ready force, able to fight for the king of Spain wherever he should care to send them. There was, in fact, royal precedent for this: only decades before, the militia of the town of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose in Florida, also composed of former slaves, was evacuated en mass to Cuba in 1763, granted homesteads together, and allowed to retain their militia titles and perquisites. …Biassou understood the value of his critical connection to the Spanish monarch and made the most of it from distant Florida. He knew that Spanish governors and captains general, regardless of their personal sentiments, were required to forward even his most controversial memorials through proper channels to the minister of war in Spain. Biassou's effort was in vain, however, for it failed to stir any sympathy or loose any funds from either official. The exiled rebels had more luck when they asked for something the governor of Florida actually had to give--vacant land. From the 15th century onward free blacks had enjoyed property rights in the Spanish Americas, earning homesteads and other privileges for helping to secure contested frontiers and defending state interests. Spain believed that "to govern is to populate"; drawing on medieval Reconquest patterns, they adopted the policy of repoblacion. Lands vacated by war, conquest, or epidemic created a dangerous vacuum into which enemies might filter, and the Crown filled these empty places with loyal settlers who, in gratitude, were to defend the royal interst as, indeed, their own. Initially the Crown relocated loyal Indian allies to threatened areas it wished to hold, but Spain also transported Galician and Canary Island populations across the Atlantic to fill critical voids. Free blacks filled the same functions in areas as diverse as Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Spanish Florida. And beginning in the 17th century, Spain formulated a policy by which rebellious maroon settlements which could not be militarily defeated might be more usefully "reduced" into legitimate and loyal free black towns. Biassou and his men petitioned for and received large land grants in Florida as nuevo pobladores, or new homesteaders. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...In recognition of their critical service, in September 1812 Governor Kindelan nominated the leaders of the Florida black militia for promotion. (Kindelan had once written, "The negro does not have the valor of the white and it is necessary to treat them harshly and direct them to avoid danger.")... Despite the lingering distrust, the governor's formulaic nominations and the promotions of Jacobo and his lieutenants required the men of the company, as well as the rest of the officers and soldiers of the Plaza, to recognize and respect these men in their new positions and grant them all "honors, favors, exemptions, and preeminences due them." (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...This action lifted the Patriot siege and allowed badly needed supplies to reach St. Augustine. The Patriot accounts (and, therefore, most historical treatments based on the English-language sources) reported that the ambush at Twelve Mile Swamp was the work of the Indians, but Governor Kindelan wrote that the "Indians" were actually "our parties of blacks, whom they [the rebels] think are Indians because they wear the same clothing and go painted." (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...During the War of 1812, as during the American Revolution, the British borrowed Spanish strategies and deliberately encouraged slaves of the enemy to desert plantations, enlist in royal military service, and be emancipated... The Spanish subject Zephaniah Kingsley, who had a large plantation on Fort George Island, Florida, later wrote, "Who was so unlucky as to see, on Cumberland Island, last war, the magical transformation of his own negroes, whom he left in the field but a few hours before, into regular soldiers, of good discipline and appearance." (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

[Picture: Free black militia officer from Veracruz and free black soldier from Havana, ca. 1779-1776] (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...In joining the Spanish AN458 militia, black men across the Atlantic became part of a corportion dating back to the Middle Ages, with special rights and privileges. These included exemptions from taxes and tribute payments and from prosecution in civil courts; the men answered only to military tribunals. Through membership in the militia, black men gained access to Spanish military patrons with whom they served. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

The Seminoles were linked to the Spanish economy not only through gifts but through the cattle trade. Free blacks like the militiaman Juan Bautista Collins were often the intermediaries in that trade... They distributed gifts of cloth, handkerchiefs, belts, beads, sugar, tobacco, aguardiente, knives, powder, and shot among their Seminole hosts before getting down to the business of buying cattle. A roundup might take five months or more as the men traveled from village to village, buying animals to herd back to St. Augustine. On one trip through the Seminole villages, the men bought a herd of 125 cattle at Chisochate, 18 of which were sold to them by a black runaway from Georgia named Molly. In the Seminole villages, as in St. Augustine, women who had escaped from chattel slavery could control property and dispose of it as htey chose. This was also true for Seminole women. Collins bought cattle from Chief Bowlegs' sister, Simency, an on one occasion she traveled to St. Augsutine to testify on his behalf in a lawsuit. Seminole women retained their cattle herds, their traditions of financial independence, and their litigious behavior for some time after the United States acquired Florida. (182). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

The free blacks from St. Augustine who visited the Seminole villages on military, commercial, or diplomatic missions probably recognized some runaway slaves from St. Augustine living among their hosts. (184) (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Godparents typically gave gifts at the baptism and were expected to provide for the spiritual and material care of their god-"child" in the event of the parents' death, but more important were th ties that bound the members of the newly-linked "family." Such extended kinship may have had even stronger significance for adult converts, many of whom were uprooted and kinless bozales (recently arrived and unaccultrated Africans). Joseph Miller argues that Africans understood Christianity as a form of healing, as well as of social integration ...Black parents may have considered the Whittens good role models, or they may have hoped for more tangible aid for their children. Whitten's origins may have also made him a desireable chocie of godfather for some African-born parents (269). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles) ...British slaves understood their society "in the idiom of kinship," and that for slaves, "familial and communal relations were one." The Spaniards also viewed society as an extension of family structures. The institution of the extended kinship group (parentela), which included blood relations, fictive kin, and sometimes even household servants and slaves, and the institution of clientela, which bound powerful patrons and their personal dependents into a network of mutual obligations, were so deeply rooted in Spain that, according to one scholar, they might have been the "primary structure of Hispanic society." Thus African and Spanish views of family and society were highly compatible, and each group surely recognized the value that the other placed on kinship. AN459 (Landers FM 27)

...A promotion from sergeant first-class to captain represented a salary raise of 75 percent for Jorge Jacobo, and Whitten earned a 73 percent raise. These gains, however, must be considred in the context of paper scrip, inflated prices, and inadequate supplies. Moreover, as it did for white officers, the government deducted sums from the black officers' salaries to pay for their coverage in a military pension fund, the Montepio militar, and for an insurance program for disabled troops, Ynvalidos. The black unit, like the white, also had to pay for its own hospitalizations (292). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Despite these earlier [Spanish] affiliations, the Seminoles during Chief Cowkeeper's rule were fiercely loyal to the British government that held Florida from 1763-1784. The Seminoles may have felt abandoned by the Spaniards who left, but their loyalty may have also been inspired by the far superior trade goods the Egnlish were able to supply... The Seminoles had earlier made slaves of defeated Yamasee enemies, and if Bartram's assessment is correct, Seminole masters had a low regard for their Yamasee slaves. The Seminoles also owned slaves of African descent, some of whom they had received as "gifts" from the British. Because the British chattel system considered slaves to be property, the Seminoles may have viewed slaves acquired from the British or through purchase in much the same way. There is evidence that Seminoles inherited slaves from family members or made gifts of them on occasion. Generations of slaves of African descent sometimes belonged to the same Seminole family. By the 1790s Chief Payne was reported to "own" some twenty black slaves along with large herds of cattle, horses, sheep, and goats, and the existence of this wealth is attested by archaeological investigations at Payne's Town. Apparently the Seminoles prized English tea sets. It was the additional labor provided by black agriculturalists that enabled the Seminoles to acquire the surplus necessary to enter an Atlantic market economy and buy those tea sets (180). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

The Seminoles, however, seem to have regarded the runaway slaves they accepted into their communities differently from the slaves they purchased or "owned." One important difference was that the Seminoles had not conquered these people; instead, these black men came as warriors with critical military knowledge and useful skills. As a result, they lived more independently than the Seminoles' slaves did, in a sort of feudal arrangement with the chiefs with whom they affiliated. In some cases the incoming runaways intermarried with Seminoles, even marrying the widows of chiefs. AN460 (180). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Although Carolina planters worried about their minority numbers and the ever-present risk of insurrection by "Domestick enemies," they continued to clamor for slaves. As a correspondent to the South Carolina Gazette sardonically commented only a year before the slave revolt at Stono in 1739, "Negroes may be said to be the Bait proper for catching a Carolina planter, as certain as Beef to catch a Shark." (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Other scholars generally agree that ethnic identifications in Africa, as well as in the Americas, were fluid and contingent, and must be used with care. Joseph Miller describes terms like "Kongo as an ethno-linguistic abstraction" and a creation of the Atlantic slave trade... Robin Law makes a similar argument about "Yoruba"... and "Mina." (259). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Documented "Meritos y Servicios" (merits and services) of any kind were a form of social capital on which Spanish subjects could draw for favors, positions, and advancements of various sorts. Persons of color had been slowly accruing such social captial since battalions of pardos (mulattoes) and morenos (blacks) were first created in Cuba at the beginning of the 17th century. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

The men of the Cuban black militia also formed extended family relationships with one another as their children intermarried and as they served as godparents and marriage sponsors for each other. The relationships provided social insurance and group solidarity and also helped to conserve resources that were recycled through dowries and inheritances. When Captain Gabriel Dorotea Arostegui in 1786 her dowry included 6,000 pesos, jewels, and clothing. When their daughter Maria Tranquilina married Captain Manel Salazar, a member of Barba's battalion, Maria's parents gave her a dowry as well, keeping these resurces within the extended family. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...The men who joined the pardo and moreno units came largely from the artisan class, like their fellow militiamen across the Atlantic. Many were carpenters like Prince Whitten; others were masons, barbers, tailors, musicians, and funeral home directors. Some with more education managed to become teachers, artists, poets, and dentists. As social aspriants, they modeled themselves after Spanish professionals, operating successful businesses, buying real estate and slaves, and supporting good works in the community. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

One way men like Barba demonstrated their civic values and piety was by creating and supporting officially sanctioned Catholic cofraternities, or cofradias. These brotherhoods provided food, alms, and medicine for the needy, supported the funerals of its members, and participated in religious observances such as Corpus Christi. Black cofradias date to at least the 14th centry in Spain and to the 16th century in the Americans, and like the militias, they were another form of corporate organization that promoted social cohesion, reinforced extended family networks, and recognized leadership generated from within the black community. Public displays of religiosity and of civic organization by the adherents confirmed black claims to Christian brotherhood and membership in the larger Spanish community. Through the civic and religious activity of such cofradias, black brothers created an accpted public sphere for themselves that contrasted with the less reputable behavior of newly imported African slaves, or bozales. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...At least some blacks in Cuba were able to read about these important events because they had been educated. Free black parents like the Whittens and the Barbas understood the importance of education and litercy as a critical marker of status and a route to upward mobility in Spanish America. Free black children with ability and connections were admitted to the Jesuit Colegio de San Jose de la Habana, where they received excellent classical educations. Ignacio Flores, for instance, a free black child, at the age of nine AN472 had already been examined successfully in ten subjects and ranked first in his class. With his teachers, encouragement, Ignacio applied to the Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Geronimo de la Habana. Following a medieval model, entrance exams were a public event which drew crowds of observers. Ignacio's father was Commandant Antonio Flores, who had served in the pardo battalion since 1708 and was a veteran of the British invasion of Havana and of the Pensacola campaign in the American Revolution. Flores proudly issued invitations to his son Ignacios examination, but at the last moment, two professors of Spanish descent launched a protest campaign. Fearful of the disorder and backlash, the university canceled Ignacio's exams. The senior Flores asked the Council of the Indies in Spain to overrule this decision, arguing that other pardo children had been examined "repeatedly in the [Jesuit] convent and other schools of Havana" and that educating pardos in the sciences and preparing them as physicians would only redound to the credit of the empire. Flores cited examples where pardos had received higher education in Peru and Mexico and quoteda legal treatise and Royal Edict which stated that the children of pardos should be regarded as Spaniards. He added that the incident had embarrassed him and his son, as it surely would have in such an honor-conscious environment. Although Flore's articulate challenge failed and the local decision was upheld, his suit demonstrated that a segment of free blacks in Havanan were receiving good educations that could benefit their families and communities. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...[During the Spanish wars for independence] the defeat of royal forces in Spanish America led officials in Cuba to feel even more besieged... black officers... were now being accused of subversive language... and being in possession of stamped paper (170). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...The leader of this alleged conspiracy, however, was not the free and educated militry man, Monzon, but rather an enslaved cook and dock worker named Margarito Blanco, who was aid to be the Okongo or leader of a secret socity called the Okongo of Ultan. Authorities were shocked that aman of Monzon's "status and circumstances" would be a part of the revolt. Calling his client by his honorific title of Don, Monzon's defense lawyer argued that it was "unimaginable" that Monzon would be involved with "subjects much inferior to him in destiny and interests." He continued, "Furthermore, it is well known by all, that the same line that divides white and black... exists between a gifted free man and an African slave (173). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Prior to the brief British occupation of 1762-1763, Cuba had relatively fewer slaves and many more free blacks than other Caribbean islands. While the British were in residence, however, they introduced approximately 4,000 African slaves into Cuba and established local mercantile and slaving connections that endured. Thereafter, British and North American traders had an important presence in Cuba. In lesser numbers, Spanish slave traders also began to import Africans into Cuba after Spain purchased the African islands of Fernando Po and Annonbom from Portual in 1778 and opened Spanish colonies to a "free trade" in slaves in 1789. The destruction of the sugar plantations in Saint Domingue in 1791further stimulated large-scale sugar cultivation and the introduction of ever larger numbers of African-born slaves into Cuba. Between 1790 and 1820 Cuban planters imported approximately 325,000 slaves, following the old Spanish formula of one female for every three males. The "Africanization" of Cuba continued apace in subsequent decades... Fernando de la Maza Arredondo, head of the Havana-based company Arredondo and Son, became of the primary links in the slave trade among Charleston, St. Augustine, and Havana, and, like others, he flouted the British and U.S. [slave trade] embargoes (206). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Captain Gabriel Dorotea Barba asked that the Company of Pardos and Morenos from Matanzas be incorporated into the Havana Battalion so that they would then be covered by the fuero. He wrote that the "Poor individuals [of that unit] despite much work and fatigue, which as not ceased since the creation [of their unit], still do not enjoy the fuero militar." (316). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

As was true in other Atlantic sites from Rio de Janeiro to Congo Square in New Orleans, enslaved Afrians in Havana had developed an alternate form of social organization, gathering in the free time allotted them on Sundays and other feast days for traditional drumming and dance. These tumbas or congadas worried urban officials, who sought to monitor and control them, and eventually they shaped these informal gatherings into a secularly licensed variant of a religious brotherhood known as cabildos de nacion. The term "cabildo" originally referred to a town council or a town meeting, and no racial or ethnic meaning was assigned to the term. In areas of heavy African importation such as Cuba AN473, however, the added phrase "de nacion" shifted the meaning to refer to groups organized along some form of African ethnicity… The cabildos' well-attended dances and the music and crowds they attracted eventually so disturbed the "honored" citizenry of Havana, however, that a 1792 edict gave them one year to relocated outside the city walls. The same edict ordered the cabildos to take the bodies of deceased members to the public mortuary rther than staging celebratory and "disorderly" wakes in their meeting houses… The activities and observances of the cabildos de nacion blended European and African cultural elements. One of their most popular celebrations was the Dia de Reyes. This was a day of license and role-reversal celebrated on the sixth of January (Epiphany), and possibly chosen for the reason that one of the three Magi (Gaspar, Melchior, or Baltasar) was reputedly black. In these processions, which date to the 16th century in Cuba and were modeled after those of the 14th century Seville, elected and richly dressed Kings and Queens of various African ethnicities paraded through the streets of Havana to be admired and to receive gifts from onlookers. AN474 Given the African respect for kings of all nations testified to by the Kongo rebel Macaya in Saint Domingue, these processions were probably read differently by whites and blacks. Participants performed African songs and dances accompanied by cowbells, drums, scrapers, and hollowed gourd rattles. They wore elaborate costumes of raffia, peacock feathers, animal skins and horns, and beads. Stilt-walkers, lantern-bearers, masked figures, and gymnasts added to the merriment. Throughout the day the Africans paraded under balconies or into courtyards, requesting aguinaldos, or gratuities, for the entertainment they provided onlookers. Guided by an intricate vocabulary of color, artifacts, and symbols, black and white observers read the cabildo processions for references to their African diety of choice. For example, Cubans still recognize the patron saint of the Lucumies, Santa Barbara, as Shango, the Virgin of Cobre as Ochun, and San Lazaro as Bab-lu-Aye. [Picture: Day of Kings or Epiphany celebration in Cuba 1850.] (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

In the wake of the Stono Rebellion of 1739, locals mounted nightly patrols of [St. John's Parish] that rounded up a number of suspected slave conspirators and transported them to Charleston for trial. There, fifty of the captured slaves were executed at the rate of ten a day in a grisly display of uncertain power. Nine years later, planters discovered another nascent rebellion: 16 whites and 104 slaves from St. John's and surrounding parishes allegedly planned to set Charleston ablaze and escape to Spanish St. Augustine. These rebels, like others before and later, headed to St. Augustine after hearing of Spain's offer to free escaped slaves who would convert to Catholicism. The nearby refuge proved so provocative that Britain launched an expensive military and naval effort to seize St. Augustine in 1740. That expedition proved a failure, and runaway ads from South Carolina newspapers document continuing attempts by runaways to flee to St. Augustine. In 1754 a group of multilingual Havana-born slaves even tried to sail from Charleston to Cuba in search of freedom. Despite constant worries about escape and rebellion, planters continued to import slaves, and by the 1770s Afrians formed at least 90 percent of the population of St. John's Parish. Prince was thus entering a region that was largely African and famed for insurrection. Local slaves could tell tales of flight and resistance, of great imperial conflicts, and of alternate forms of government and freedom to the south. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...John Leonardy, from whom Whitten leased farmland, testified in support of his claim: "I knew Prince Whitton... [The Patriots] had possession of all the country--He could not have gone out there with safety... When Prince left his place to come into the city he had then at his place 4 or 5 head of milk cows, also five or six horses... he and his family came to town in a canoe or boat down the North River--his home was about 1/2 miles from the River--I came in the same day that he did, & I am sure that he brought none of his cows or horses with him--The call from the Governor was a sudden one and we had no time to pick up anything--we came off directly. Prince left behind hmi his corn mill & plantation tools, etc., might have been worth almot 200 p [pesos]. He had two timber carts which were worth $150. He was in the habit of getting out cedar and ranging timber and had considerable at the landing t the time he quit. He had three or four hundred feet of ranging timber at the landing and about 5,000 or 6,000 feet of cedar--ranging timber was worth about two bits per foot and the cedar was wroth then at the landing--about three bits a foot. I do not remember whether he had any other lumber on hand--This lumber was burnt--I saw pieces of it afterwards at the landing when I went there... He had on hand sawed lumber at the time he abandoned his place. I expect about 5,000 or 6,000 feet worth about $25 per--He had a canoe which he left there worth about 30 dollars--he did not come down to town in his own canoe--he came with the pilots in their boats--The Governor sent them for us. He brought nothing at all with him except his family--they all came with him--He had a grindstone--a whip saw and a crop cut saw. The horses were worth from $40 to $50 each. The cows about $16. The fences around his place were rail fences--worth about $200." (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

[Black militias] had long been a mainstay of Cuba's defense, but after the shocking capture of Havana "Pearl of the Antilles," Spain depended even more heavily upon these troops. Embarking on a campaign to shore up its military defenses throughout the Americas, the Spanish Crown created "disciplined" militias, including more pardo and moreno untis. In contrast to provincial and urban militias, which were supported by private or corporate sponsors and called up only in emergencies, as was the free black militia in Florida, these were regular units with elected black officers, systematic training, and state-supplied pay, equipment, arms, and uniforms. The men in the disciplined militias received pensions as well as medical and burial benefits. These were all postitive inducements for enlistment, but in the status-conscious and hierarchical Spanish world, military service was more than an employment; it was a way to improve one's social standing. Upon joining these units, men of African descent became part of a--at least theoretically-color-blind military corporation. Officers like Barba were entitled to use the honorific "Don" before their names. The corporate privileges of the new disciplined militias included the important fuero miltar, an exemption from prosecution in civil courts and from tribute payments that were associated with subjugation and degraded status. Like titles, clothing was an important marker of rank in the Spanish world, and the new black units paid particular attention to the design of thier uniforms, informing Spain in detail about their selection of colors, boots, hats, and even buttons. The men wore these impressive outfits as tehy drilled on Sundays in the central plazas of towns throughout the Atlantic, making an important social statement as tehy marched. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

In public ceremonies held in the same plazas, Spanish officials honored black militiamen for exceptional bravery and also upon retirement after 25 to 5 years of military service. The Diario de la Habana reported the honorific ceremonies and the names of the men who received gold or silver medals bearing the likenesses of the Spanish monarches or the Escutcheon of Fidelity, such as Prince Whitten requested on his retirement. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

While the countryside grew increasingly African, the city of Matanzas was home to a more creolized and international free black population... Like the white population, they were a diverse lot, with orgins in the French, British, and Spanish Caribbeans as well as Africa. Free people of color held occupational and social positions similar to those of their counterparts in Havana, St. Augustine, or New Orleans. They employed traditional means such as self-hire and coartacion (graduated self-purchase) to acquire freedom, and once free they ran small businesses, farmed, and joined the institutions which offered them the most advantages--the church and the military (209). In 1726 the free people of color in Matanzas established the cofradia of Santa Misericordia and another devoted to the Virgin of the Rosary, reforming the latter in 1736. The head of the Santa Misericordia brotherhood was Captain Manuel de Soto of the pardo militia of Matanzas. Captain de Soto and his company were posted for some time in St. Augustine and had helped Captain Francisco Menendez and the black militia of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose defend that frontier against British and English raiders. Despite that service, the black militia of Matanzas did not enjoy the status of its Havana counterpart: as of 1812, it still had not been granted the privilege of the fuero militar (210). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...One might think that Atlantic Creoles would have been eager participants in the revolutions of their day, most of which promised freedom for the enslaved and racial equality for those already free. Even as monarchical systems broke down, however, for many Atlantic Creoles they still seemed their best home. In fact, as we ahve seen, Rivas and Rayt and many of the Atlantic Creoles whose histories are recovered here pinned their hopes for freedom on a personal relationship with a distant monarch and on centuries-old legal, religious, and social constructs. This might seem to be anachronistic thinking, even retrograde, for many of these individuals monarchy was, in fact, the best option. King Carlos and King Ferdinand of Spain, King George of England, and King Louis of France actually did free many enslaved persons, who became their loyal subjects and ardent defenders. The slave rebel Macaya compared the three European Kings to the three Magi of the Bible, writing in Saint Domingue that "these three kings are the descendants of those, who, led by a star, came to adore God made man." This interesting understanding of and reverence for kings suggest the powerful symbolic meaning they had for many African-born people and their descendants. On a more practical note, many Atlantic Creoles acquired freedom, propery, and at least limited prosperity under the monarchical rule of Great Britain, France, or Spain. Those Atlantic Creoles who had lived among and knew the racial politics of the southern Patriots who helped create the United States of America understood they could hope for none of those things under that new democracy. The very racial intransigence of Southerners predisposed the Atlantic Creoles to the British and Spanish monarchies, at least initially. Moreover, Atlantic Creoles clearly read the signs of American expansionism and knew the U.S. goverment was bent on returning them to slavery. The Americans were equally determined to rid the land of the indigenous nations that stood in their way, and it is not suprising that both blacks and Seminoles rejected the democracy that demonized them (233). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

AN490 …During the summer of 1812, as the Patriots seized Amelia Island and occupied plantations and forts on Florida's northern border, the governor ordered all subjects living in the countryside to come into town. Free black militiamen went out on patrols to scout the enemy and herd cattle back to St. Augustine to feed the hungry townspeople. The free mulatto militiaman Juan Antonio Florencio later testified that under the command of Sergeant Prince Whitten and Tony Doctor, the men gathered in forty to sixty head of cattle at a time. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

In 1763, the British acquired Florida by treaty and Menendez led his freed "subjects" into exile in Cuba, where they remade their lives on a new Spanish frontier. The arc of Menendez's fascinating life, during which he reshaped his identity and circumstances multiple times, demonstrates how enslaved persons learned about and acted on possibilities to regain their lost liberty. His is an amazing story, and yet it was only one of many. [Sketch by Albert Manucy: Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, 1760] (Landers: Atlantic Creoles) Although noted for its poverty and the misery of its people, Mose survived as a free town and military outpost for St. Augustine until 1763, when, through fortunes of war, Spain lost the province to the British. The Spanish evacuated St. Augustine and its dependent black and Indian towns, and the occupants were resettled in Cuba. The people of Mose left behind their meager homes and belongings and followed their hosts into exile to become homesteaders in Matanzas, Cuba—consigned once more to a rough frontier. The crown granted them new lands, a few tools, and a minimal subsidy, as well as an African slave to each of the leaders of the community; however, Spanish support was never sufficient, and the people from Mose suffered terrible privations at Matanzas. Some of them, including Francisco Menendez, eventually relocated to Havana, which offered at least the possibility of a better life, and this last diaspora scattered the black community of Mose. (Landers FM 32) The Spanish subsequently extended the religious sanctuary policy confirmed at Mose to other areas of the Caribbean and applied it to the disadvantage of Dutch and French slave holders, as well as the British. The lives and efforts of the people of Mose thus took on international significance. Moreover, their accomplishments outlived them. The second Spanish government recognized religious sanctuary from 1784 until it bowed to the pressures of the new U.S. government and its pervasive secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, and abrogated the policy in 1790. Before that escape hatch closed, several hundred slaves belonging to British loyalists followed the example of the people of Mose to achieve emancipation in Florida. Thus the determined fugitives who struggled so hard to win their own freedom inadvertently furthered this cause of freedom for others whom they never knew. (Landers FM 34)

...Over the next several years, some of the Florida families left Havana for Matanzas, where Francisco Menendez had helped relocated Florida's first exiled free black community of Gracia Real de Santa Teresea de Mose. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...Among the Florida families leaving for Matanzas were those of... Corporal Pedro Yznardi (the mulatto son of Florida's treasurer (306). (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...In 1790, however, Spain bowed to U.S. pressure and agreed to shut down the southbound "underground railroad." Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson commended Spain for the policy shift, saying it was "essential to the good relations" between Spain and the United States. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)

...In May of [1790], Spain yielded to strong diplomatic pressure by U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and abrogated the sanctuary policy that Spain had first established in 1693. The Spanish governor posted notices in Southern newspapers announcing that therafter fugitive slaves could no longer expect to be received and freed in St. Augustine. Responding to a request for clarification from Florida's governor, the Captain General of Cuba declared that "there was absolutely no doubt" that runaways who had already been freed, like the Whittens, retained their freedom and their rights as Spanish subjects. (Landers: Atlantic Creoles)